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Today is Ascension Sunday. I like to think of it as Coronation Sunday for King Jesus. Today we celebrate Jesus being carried back into the realm of heaven and there he assumes his place at the right hand of God the Father and is crowned Lord of all creation. Now I’m not trying to be punny or funny, but the Latin word for crown, which is rooted in the Greek word koronē which means garland, is corona. Hence, the act of enthroning someone is a coronation, an act of crowning. So, today we make special effort to say “Hail, King Jesus” and “Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne.”
To celebrate that Jesus has ascended has challenges inherent to it. First, there’s trying to describe the mechanics of Jesus physically ascending into heaven – you know, the where did he go and how’s that possible topics. Trying to talk about that in a world of sceptics is like talking about quantum physics in a church. I’ve done that on a few Ascension Sundays before, but one never seems to be able to get beyond conjecture. I’m not one of those who say to check your brain and just leave it to faith and so I keep searching for a way to explain Jesus going back into heaven that demonstrates that in the realm of quantum physics it is possible for a resurrected human to ascend into another dimension…but perhaps I’ve watched too much Star Trek.
Another problem is the language of monarchy. To speak of Jesus as a king taking his throne over heaven and earth comes across as rather archaic these days, especially if you live in one of these Modern Western democracies that endured a war of revolution to free itself of the rule of a corrupted monarchy. As an American living in Canada, I will readily admit that I don’t get the relationship this nation still has with the British monarchy. But hey, to each, its own. Whatever. I won’t start a Scots-Irish rant about it.
Anyway, as we don’t live under the direct authority of a monarch, it is safe to assume that we have lost a core, fundamental understanding of what biblical faith is. To understand what faith is in the Bible we have to think in terms of the relationship between monarchs and their subjects. In this sense, Biblical faith is better understood as allegiance, as utter reliance upon and fidelity to a king or queen. We children of Modernity don’t get that. Instead, we have a very democratised and individualistic understanding of faith which we read back into the Bible in an unhelpful way. We like to think of faith as a matter of individual personal choice with respect to what I want to believe and put my trust in. We think of faith as a personal choice to accept things that can’t otherwise be proven by science or reason. We think of faith as the opposite of doubt. In essence, the way we Modern’s have come to define faith places God in the same category as unicorns, leprechauns, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster – two of which I personally believe in but I won’t say which. There’s no wonder atheists abound.
But biblically speaking, it is more correct for us to discard our Modern ideas of what faith is and talk more of faithfulness, of allegiance to a monarch. You see, faith, like love, is something we do. The Greek word we translate as faith was used back then to describe a particular way one participates in certain relationships particularly relationships requiring a vow. Marriage, for example, faith isn’t just that I believe in the existence of my wife. It’s that we are faithful to each other. Faith is conducting oneself according to pledges of loyalty. In Roman days, they even used faith to describe the relationship between crime lords and their thugs. Rarely is faith used to describe intellectual ascent to something that science or reason can’t prove.
In the biblical big picture, faith is best defined as our loyal participation in the sphere of reality where the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, is making his promise to save his Creation from sin, death, and evil come about. So, on Ascension Sunday we say that Jesus has taken his throne as the supreme monarch of God’s good Creation and we pledge our allegiance as willing-to-die-to-ourselves-for-him participants in what God is doing in, through, and as him to save his good Creation.
To pledge allegiance and act accordingly…growing up in the States, as child every day of school began with a pledge of allegiance to the flag on the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Here in Canada students just have to listen as the national anthem is played. The Pledge of Allegiance was adopted in States in 1892 as a way of developing nationalistic spirit and fidelity among the myriads of immigrants who had come to the States to live. We understood that making that pledge meant faithfully carrying out the duties of being a citizen of the United States. We may have had our varying beliefs about what America stands for. (Even today it stills seems the limits of the word “all” to whom liberty and justice should apply is still up for debate for in practice it obviously does not mean everybody.) Regardless, I/we understood that making that pledge meant that I would lay down my life for the greater good of the people of my nation.
Biblical faith is more like that, a pledge of allegiance to Jesus Christ and his kingdom – a promise to participate faithfully at the cost of one’s own life in what God is really doing in history to save his good Creation from sin, death, and evil. I hope you can understand that faith in Jesus Christ isn’t just what you confess to get yourself into heaven when you die. Faith in Jesus Christ has profound political implications. It supersedes any pledge of allegiance made to any other person, nation, or organization. In 1954, when the American Congress inserted “under God” after “one nation”, they committed a serious faux pas making it seem that being American is the same as being Christian. It is not.
In the first century for the first Christians to call Jesus Son of God, Lord, and Saviour was an act of treason in the Roman Empire. The Roman emperors claimed those titles for themselves. There were grave consequences for pledging allegiance to Jesus the crucified and risen King who reigns from heaven. No matter how upstanding you were or how much good you and your Christian friends did in your community, proclaiming that Jesus is Lord could quite easily offend the good citizens of the Roman Empire with the result that you could find yourself banned from your profession, stoned outside the city, skinned alive, burned at a stake, or the source of sick public entertainment in the arena fighting wild animals or getting butchered by gladiators, or crucified as Jesus was.
That was then. What about today? How does one live faithfully to Jesus the King? Well, let me kick back to the word for the day, corona. When there is a solar eclipse there comes a moment when the moon comes directly between the sun and the earth so that the sun and moon appear to be a black circle encircled by a crown, which we call the corona. One way of understanding what it means for Jesus to be glorified is to think of how his crown, his corona, the emblem of his rule shines forth into this world. I would hope that the answer is obvious – us, those who live in allegiance to him, and the life we share together in him.
If we do a quick scan of the word glorify in our reading today, we find that Jesus glorified the Father here on earth by doing what the Father sent him to do. That means that Jesus revealed the nature of the Father. Jesus then prays that the Father glorify him in his presence by restoring to him the glory he had in the Father’s presence before the world was created. That’s verses 4 and five. Hop down to verse 10 we find that Jesus is glorified in us. He is in us, we are in him, and he is glorified in us. From verse 11 where Jesus prays the Father protect us so that we may be one as they are one, we can surmise that the glory of Jesus is in the unity we share in him that he shares with the Father.
Christian unity is the corona of Christ. In the same way that the sun cannot be seen behind the moon in a solar eclipse so also Jesus cannot be seen because he has gone to the Father. So also, just as the presence of the sun continues to be evident as the corona around the moon, the corona of the One who is the Light of the world is still visible. To speak in high lofty terms, God is love. God is the loving communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons who empty themselves in love for each other so completely that they are on. They include us in their union in love by coming to live in us. By the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us we are unioned to Jesus who is unioned by the same Holy Spirit to the Father and thus we are united to Father as Jesus is, as his beloved children. Chew on that whilst I move on.
This unity, this union, this bond, this living relationship of love that we have with Jesus and the Father in the Holy Spirit becomes visible when we lay down our lives, our soul, our me for one another. I would encourage to go back and have another listen or read of last week’s sermon. The joyful bond of true friendship is found among the followers of Jesus when we strip ourselves of any claims to glory we think we might be entitled to and wash each other’s nasty, stinky feet as Jesus did during the last meal he shared with his disciples…not literally, but the example of humility persists.
So, what is it to be the corona of Christ in a world that’s suffering under a pandemic involving a corona virus? Another way of asking that is to say how can we say Jesus rules this world in love when the world is suffering so much? Well, Christian unity, the corona of King Jesus, looks like the love required to be patient with family members as we’re cooped up together in lockdowns. It looks like suffering the dread inconvenience of wearing a mask and keeping distant. It looks like phone calls to those who feel forgotten. It looks like ordering take out from one of the local restaurants or curbside from local businesses that could go under because of all this. It looks like generous donations to organizations like PWS&D to help those in poorer nations get medical supplies and bury their dead. It looks like petitioning governments to get big pharma to stop profiting off the vaccine and find a way to make it globally available. Jesus’ corona shines through the love that arises when people suffer together and in the midst of that suffering serve one another selflessly and unconditionally. The day will come when he will put the powers that be in their place. Until then, we find him present and ministering among the suffering…which is exactly where we should be. Amen.
